Much to my surprise and yeah, even annoyance, I’ve come across many people who, no matter what, cannot be coerced into optimism.

I’ve met scores of them, possibly because that trait used to be mine as well. These are the people determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, who become obsessed with seeing the down side of things and who refuse to enjoy the present because, sadly, it’ll end some time.

Take for example friends of ours in graduate school in Virginia who decided not to have any kids. Why? “Well, my sister’s only child grew up too quickly, graduated from college and moved away. And now she hardly ever even writes to her, and I never want to go through that.”

As devastating as Missie’s estrangement may have been, that doesn’t mean the sister’s sister ought never have children. The human race would soon die out if we all believed and practiced that.

But on a more sanguine note, how about the ones who refuse to enjoy summer vacation because by August, it’ll be over? Before we take that tack, let me be clear: I liked going to school. True, vacation was great, but at no time did I sit idle forcing myself to be miserable in the knowledge that school would be starting come September.

As a kid on summer vacation, I pictured life as a bicycle going downhill. At the time, around 1950, the road between Las Vegas and Tucumcari was not paved.

The surface was caliche-ridden, not to be confused with cliché-ridden, which is how some people might describe this column.

Life-on-a-bike came true for a couple of summers, as a friend of the family agreed to drive several of us boys some 15 miles east, toward the village of Trujillo, where we’d mount our bikes. The driver provided this chauffeur service only as long as the highway construction project lasted in that area. He was the foreman, and he used a state truck.

It was great fun, and I likened the downhill coasting to summer vacation and decided to enjoy it while it lasted. When people ride bikes downhill, their impulse is to generate as much speed as possible. That has at least two effects: It ramps up the adrenaline, which every daredevil enjoys, but it also ends the ride — and the fun — faster.

Well, it was usually several days before our truck-driving friend would agree to haul us back up the hill, but at least we had something to look forward to.

And yet we realized that no matter how fast we rode our bikes, the passing of summer vacation didn’t change. We still had several weeks to go. And even if we really picked up the pace on the bikes, thus shortening the time of the ride, we didn’t shorten the days and weeks.

In those days, we went to school when the academic year ran from Labor Day to Memorial Day, not like today, when the starting day gets earlier and the last day gets pushed back, by legislative fiat. The result is that some schools begin the second week of August and end in early June.

The bike rides cured me, and I never again dreaded the future to the point where I failed to seize the day. Now some may argue there’s not much left of the diem to be carped. They have a point, but my only point is that given a chance to fly down a steep hill, I’m out to enjoy the moment, not fret about the fact that it’s going to end.

Several weeks of harrowing bike rides intoxicated me, and from that point on, I made the best of school, certainly not the best grades, but the best of the situation.

My new attitude toward school may have been merely the anticipation of another summer vacation. And that outlook explains why I’m perpetually puzzled by the present prevalent attitude that people must hate school.

A few days ago, the Journal ran an article about a miscalculation that will require some Albuquerque school children to attend as many as 20 more days of school to make up for a shortfall. The article mentioned “anger” and “punishment” as if there were something wrong with having school.

Now understandably, the person who mis-figured the formula for minutes-in-class probably angered scores of people whose summer vacations with kids had already been planned. Yet, school itself ought not be an ordeal.

The notion of school as purgatory seems common. Notice how often the Albuquerque TV stations do their part to promulgate that idea when announcing a snow day. Dick Knipfing and other anchors begin with something like, “Kids are jumping for joy because there’s no school tomorrow.”

That snow day is going to have to be made up, probably some time in June. The concept of having a snow day was foreign to all of us at Immaculate Conception School. True, on snowy days we often had “double-session,” by skipping lunch, remaining an hour after the lunch hour, and getting dismissed by 2 instead of 3:15. But apparently school was never cancelled for a whole day. Not ever.

Schools nowadays call off school at the drop of a flake. But whether others view things as pleasure or purgatory, I agree with the Roman poet Horace, who urged us to seize the day. Whether the glass is half-empty or half-full, it still contains something to drink.

Bottoms up.